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How To See What People Do On Your Website

If you own a website and you want it to generate more leads or sales for your business, then it’s essential that you take time to understand exactly how different people are using it.

Even if you’ve just launched a website, or had your website designed – start monitoring people’s movements right now.

There’s a wide range of tools out there that can track the movement and clicks on your website, but at Spiral we really like CrazyEgg.

They currently offer a 90 day free trial, which is a very generous amount of time to track and record the activity on a wide range of your key performance pages – i.e. the pages that help and contribute the most towards your revenue goals.

With this vital information, you can physically see what people do and where they click. The decisions you can then make with this type of information will be highly qualified and can significantly help increase your conversion rates and overall website performance. With this information, you’ll know;

How mobile and desktop users differ in their browsing patterns; how far they scroll and what they click on

Whether your current call to actions are getting used as you expect, or even seen

How far down the page are people scrolling and are the most important elements regularly in view

How search engine visitors use your site in comparison to other channels

As the data is being tracked, CrazyEgg create and populate a small range of downloadable heat map screen shots. These include simple ‘confetti’ visuals which represent where people are clicking, all the way through to ‘scroll maps’ which shows you what parts of a page stays on the screen the most.

Example of Scroll Map..

Here’s an example of a scroll map for the Desktop view. The white/yellow colouring represents the part of the page that is seen and in view the most and dark blue are parts of the page that aren’t viewed a lot.

With this information, we can see that the majority of the visitors aren’t scrolling very far through the page. For this particular website, we want people to engage with the main navigation menu or better yet, subscribe to the monthly newsletter for the latest information about Lincolnshire.

However, if we had elements further down the page that were inportant to our goals then we may want to think about moving parts of the page around to make sure that the specific element is seen more.

Example of Confetti view

With confetti view, you can actually see where people have clicked. The view below has only been running a short while before writing this blog post, but we will update it as well as updating our recommendations.

This actually helps identify a strong message; that it’s very important to look at and compare all the reports CrazyEgg provide you rather than looking at one. For example, above I said that we were happy that the Newsletter box was in view the most because we wanted people to subscribe. However, the Confetti Map tell us that even though the Newsletter box is in view, nobody is subscribing as we can see that the “Submit” button hasn’t been clicked.

So what could this mean? Either people generally aren’t interested in a newsletter for this type of website OR our message isn’t convincing enough. As a result of this, we will change the benefit statement and then look at how this has effected sign ups. Of course, we know that not many people have signed up from the homepage because we can see through the admin area – but using this as an example should demonstrate to you that you can’t just rely on one map-type.

You may also notice that some dots on Confetti map are brighter than others; this is because the bright (more intense) dots demonstrate where people have clicked the most.

What’s also interesting is that the “What’s on” and “Explore Lincolnshire” are the most clicked items in the navigation menu – so maybe we should amend the benefit statement within the Newsletter box to tell people we’ll share new events and insights into what’s on around the county. Maybe this is what people want from the Newsletter? We shall test and see.

So, What’s Next?

Hopefully this has given you an idea of what CrazyEgg is and the ways it can help constantly challenge your website’s ability to convert as well as give you plenty of insights for fresh ideas on what your visitors want.

Signing Up for CrazyEgg

To sign up for a free 90-day trial to try it out for yourself, simply go to CrazyEgg.com, then enter the URL of the website you’d like to track.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be asked to create an account by providing an email and password, which you’ll use to access your account.

Now that you’ve set up an account with CrazyEgg, you can start adding individual pages. Unfortunately, you’ll need to manually add in any pages you would like to be tracked, since this isn’t done for you. Then you’ll see these listed in your dashboard as ‘snapshots’. It’s important to note that tracking desktop, tablet and mobile versions of a single page will count as three separate snapshots.

Once I’ve signed up, what’s next?

Once you’ve got your CrazyEgg account set-up and it’s been running for a while, start viewing the results with your colleagues, business partners or better yet, your website designer.

You’ll then be able to get the same understanding as we have about how people move around and use your website, then make informative decisions on what you may want to do/change next. Here’s a little reminder of what you have available and what you might learn;

the heat-map/confetti analysis

This feature shows you where website visitors are clicking on each of your web pages.

If site visitors are not clicking where you expect, you can make design changes to adjust the page layout.

Maybe change the colour of your ‘Call to Action’ button to see which colour generates the best CTR (click-through rate).

Since every site is different, the best way to optimise the conversion rate is to simply try and test different variations of pages.

the scroll-map analysis

This enables you to visualise how far down the page your website visitors are scrolling.

Do you have important content ‘below the fold’ that you’d like 100% of visitors to see before leaving the page?

You can look at the scroll-map to see what percentage of visitors are scrolling to a section of the page.

Based on the visual data generated by CrazyEgg, you can make design change decisions on an ongoing basis.

If you make a change to your website

After you make a change to a page, simply click ‘Update this snapshot’, and it’ll start analysing the visitors again.

This process can be ongoing until you’re 100% satisfied with every page on your site, though this may take a while, and in many cases is simply an ongoing task.

Post Trial Pricing

If you don’t wish to pay for the service, then all you have to do is cancel within the 90 days, however with prices starting from only $9/month, it’s a great deal!

After the free 90 day trial period, here’s the four different levels of pricing / subscriptions that’s available to you;

Basic – $108/year (Track 10,000 visits/month, and up to 10 pages at once)

Standard – $228/year (Track 25,000 visits/month, and up to 20 pages at once)

Plus – $588/year (Track 100,000 visits/month, and up to 50 pages at once)

Pro – $1188/year (Track 250,000 visits/month, and up to 100 pages at once)